Joining the Hipster Jean Cult

I had my first consultation with Zevon and Petra while dining at a tapas bar in Los Feliz. As we munched on salmon and sweet potato croquettes and washed them down with Lambic Framboise,  we discussed my woefully frumpy dress code. Petra made it clear that my polyester wrinkle-free elastic waistband khakis had become both obsolescent and unpatriotic in the face of our a new multi-ethnic President whose elegant fashion wear, mostly dark two-button suits with white dress shirts and tastefully placed boutonnieres, had become the inspiration of such fashion luminaries as Sonia Rykiel, Donatella Versace, and Jean-Charles De Castelbajac.  In addition to buying similar wardrobes, I would need to find some casual fashion that would complement our culture’s shift to Hipsterdome. Specifically, I would need a pair of hipster jeans. This would prove a difficult task as I had purchased the twenty-dollar variety of jeans at Costco and Target over the last decade or so. Petra made it clear that this simply would not do. She handed me a list of “acceptable” brands and told me to acquaint myself with it.

Evisu, True Religion, G-Star, Slim Flare, Citizens of Humanity, Nudie, 7 For All Mankind, Diesel . . . I found myself a bit intoxicated as I recited the names of jeans that cost between $200-400, jeans that boasted of denim so soft, so textured, so resplendent, so magical, so distinctive, and so empowering that they put all other jeans to shame and rendered the wearers of those inferior jeans pariahs unworthy of the New Hipster Age. The glorious name-brand jeans I am speaking of had almost supernatural powers so that simply wearing them would afford me membership to a special club, a high-brow coterie of people in-the-know, people who could not be bothered by the rest of mundane humanity.

This was not always so. For many years designer jeans, especially acid wash jeans and jeans that featured lightening bolts on the back pocket, were considered passé, low-brow, and vulgar as a more minimalist approach to jeans, like 501 Levis, was considered the utmost expression in good taste. But the jean makers brainstormed and found ways to make designer jeans cool again. They used sheer fabrics, cool logos, such as gorillas and a smiling Buddha, and “distressed” the jeans by shredding them with cheese graters, scratching them with sandpaper, and shooting bullets at them, so that the wearer looked like he had just doubled as Bruce Willis’ stuntman in his latest blockbuster. Designers jeans were chic again. And to keep their mystique, the marketers often drove them underground, keeping them away from mainstream stores so that if one wanted to keep updated on the new designer jeans, one would have to join a secret society of jean fetishists.

 This underground designer jean society often communicated on Internet message boards, chat sites, and met monthly at swank cocktail parties where they would show-off their jeans to others whose jean expertise made them qualified to truly appreciate the way the jeans showcased their svelte thighs, cupped and massaged their rock-hard buttocks, and delineated the appropriate, eye-brow-raising bulges in their serpentine crotch. Marriages and other dynamic relationships were born from these designer jean parties where matches were made in denim heaven.

Of course, ordinary people lacked the imagination and refined sensibility to seek out and wear the designer jeans I am speaking of. Rather, only a rare breed, a self-described cognoscenti, coveted these elite jeans. They were people who were plugged-in to a mysterious network through which their belonging entitled them to know everything that went on in this world that “really mattered” before it “went mainstream.” They had, for example, unique access to special underground warehouses in the garment district where they could buy jeans as rare and mysterious as the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were remote locations so secret they had to be blindfolded and escorted down several spiral stairs to a dank basement where an old lady with moth-ball breath would rudely shove the pair of designer jeans into their hands after they gave her a wad of cash. They weren’t even allowed to try the jeans on, but because their very elusiveness gave them unusually high cachet among the designer jean community, they took the chance that they’d be a perfect fit and usually they were right and found that these underground designer jeans afforded them glories that no other jean could give them.

This isn’t to say members of the elite designer jean cult were absent of problems. They had some, to be sure. One is that once they put on a pair of jeans that they absolutely loved, they found it almost impossible to take the jeans off, even for showers, the beach, and bedtime, so that their jeans doubled as bathing suits and pajama bottoms. Also the first day they got their jeans they’d often be overcome with a sort of ambulatory mania by which they’d feel compelled to walk all over town so that the world could see them in our perfect-fit jeans. They’d strut across the mall, around the neighborhood, and into strange homes and do a pirouette until they were escorted off the premises or chased away by vicious attack dogs. They couldn’t wash these jeans because every wash faded and thus diminished them. Thus they walked around in filthy, great looking denim rags, Fabreezing them, but soon, that's wasn’t enough to curtail the stench.

I wanted to join their ranks. I wanted to wear fabulous jeans that allowed me to wear a tattered shirt with hole-ridden sneakers and still be “dressed up” and so I spent hundreds of dollars on G-Stars, Lucky Brand, Diesel, and Banana Republic jeans. My attempts at becoming a cool jean wearer failed. One problem is that the fit often looked good in the store’s dressing room mirror but when I got home the pants seemed too baggy or slouched in the wrong place or simply lacked the pizzazz I saw inside the store, a phenomenon I attributed to the store’s “showroom” lighting.

And then one day while traipsing at the supermarket in my new G-Stars I discovered the root of my problem: Two skinny girls stared at my tight-fitting jeans before bursting into shrill laughter. I didn’t know what they were laughing at, but then I looked at my reflection in the dairy case and saw two bulging thighs that looked less human and more brontosaurus-like. The jeans looked so ridiculously spray-painted on my chunky quads that I would have looked more appropriate wearing a undersized kilt. It was time to face the facts: I was not built to wear ultra-cool jeans because my Irish and Polish ancestors were surly peasants with long trunks and chunky legs who survived draughts with their sluggish metabolism and repelled invasions by intimidating their intruders—barbarians, marauders, Huns—from their precious potato larder. I can imagine one of my ancient relatives, a burly brute, clobbering a would-be thief over the head with a huge raw potato before taking a bite out of the rock-hard vegetable, his teeth black and rotten. My family history dictates that no matter what I do I am destined to be built like a gorilla with body lines unsuitable for Speedo bikini briefs, body-hugging silk shirts, Italian leisure suits, and, yes, designer jeans. Logic dictated, then, that I should give up my taste for designer jeans and opt for baggy Jeanie pants and overalls.

I called Petra and vented my frustration. She said she was sorry and regretted telling me earlier that I was too big to be a hipster.

“The hipster always has a tight ass,” she said. “And the trick is he maintains his tight ass without trying.”

“Where does that leave me?”

“You will have to work hard at turning those buns of yours into steel.”

“But you just said the hipster never tries to be lean. He just is.”

“Or he makes an effort, but doesn’t tell anyone.”

It seems like the first rule in Hipster Club is that as soon as you let people know you’re trying to be a hipster, you are no longer a hipster. 

Comments

[geraldj]

being a hopeless troglodyte, i wonder, isnt hipsterism closely related to metrosexualism??

[jeffrey McMahon]

Probably. Of course, this hipster idea is a joke about affectation, pretension, etc.

[geraldj]

yeah ive noticed a sardonic flavor in the hipster posts.

[jeffrey McMahon]

The idea is that a hopeless suburbanite tries to be a hipster and his feeble attempts define who he is. I'm inspired by Tooter Turtle, a goofy cartoon character who always tries to be something he isn't. Mr. Wizard always sets him straight and saves his butt.

[Angelo]

I buy my jeans online. They're made by Diamond Gusset. The crotch has a gusset sewn in so that the pants fit loosely below the waist---the fabric doesn't pull and bunch up. I think it's "hip" to wear jeans that fit. You can move and groove in these things! They price out roughtly the same as buying good jeans from the Gap, but are much more unique and fit better. Made In U.S.A. too!